October 2005 - Posts

• Beware, ye who enter here. Magic post ahead.

  Hello everyone.  I'm Jeff.  (Hi, Jeff)  And I'm a recovering Magic the Gathering player.  Up until this month, I was sober for two years.   Everyone in our Lumbersmiths group used to be a Magic player to some degree.  I was hardcore early, anticipating the first Unlimited release and playing all the early sets through Ice Age.  I was known for my Chaos Orb technique, if that tells you anything.  Jay and Joe were both huge MtG fans, too.  They both still have their collections and occasionally purchase a new set to see what's the latest buzz in the game.     Earlier this month, Joe bought a box of boosters from the new set, Ravnica.  It's becoming tradition that if anyone buys a box of boosters, we have a Magic night and do a booster draft with the new cards.  The last time we did this was with the release of Mirrodin, so it's been a while.  We met up at Brandon's house and sat around the table with the still-sealed box of boosters when we noticed something was missing.  Lands.  Who brought the land?!  Unfortunately, Brandon only had a handful in the decks he kept.  My place is only a mile down the road from Brandon, and while I got rid of my collection long ago, I just inherited a big set of cards from Karl that he didn't want to take down to Tampa.  To the Batmobile!  We cruised down to my house and the Magic night was saved.     The draft was great fun.  Ravnica focuses on a concept called "Guilds".  The guild cards are somewhat like the cards from the old Legends set, where two mana types are needed to cast the cards.  However, Ravnica introduced an "either" mechanic, where a mana cost might be "either green or black".  This made for an interesting draft.  First of all, not all of the color combinations were represented.  The guilds present were green/black, blue/black and red/white.  This meant more competition for similar colors.  In fact Jay, my partner for the first games, drafted the exact same blue/black cards that I was drafting!  I threw in a splash of green, while he chose to stick to two colors and defensively draft powerful cards in other colors.   Jay and I were doomed from the start, having drafted the same colors.  Joe played a green/black deck while Brandon was the only one playing red/white.  He had a killer deck.  They beat us convincingly three games in a row.  Later we swapped partners for a couple of games and Brandon and I won the last two games.   Booster drafting is my favorite way to play Magic.  The drafting is as fun (if not more so) than playing the actual game.  Although I don't foresee me ever buying into Magic again, I love getting together for a Magic night once a year. Posted Oct 31 2005, 09:47 AM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Session Report

• Friday Gaming: For Sale, Metro, Ra & Ticket to Ride

  Friday night was a great night of gaming.  Jason is still occupied with the responsibilities of fatherhood, so he couldn't make it.  I wound up inviting Eric, one of the guys I played Die Macher with last month.  He joined me, Jay, Joe and Brandon for some gaming at Jay's house.  It's been a while since we've had a group of five, which is a nice number for games.  We even had another visitor, as occasional-gamer Dave's dog (Jasper) was over for the weekend.  With Beowulf (Jay's dog), Jasper, and five gamers, we had a full house.   For Sale While waiting on pizza to arrive, we played a quick warm-up game of For Sale.  This is one of my favorite filler games, mostly because the rules can be explained in less than 2 minutes.  The entire game takes less than 15 minutes to play, and has just the right amount of bidding strategy for a light game.  Two remarkable things occurred in our game.  First, I managed to get a voided check when I sold my house with a value of 24.  It was the highest card I owned, with an even distribution of 25-30 among the other 4 players, meaning my 24 was lowest.  Ouch!  Second, Jay was a shrewd bidder again and ended the first bidding round with a surplus of $7,000.   Final Scores: Jay:  67 Brandon:  49 Eric:  48 Joe:  45 Jeff 41   Metro After filling up on pizza, (with the World Series on Saturday, I had pizza two nights in a row.  not good!) we broke out Metro, a good game for any number of players.  We've played Metro where each player has a hand of 2 tiles, giving them more options during a turn, but the games take longer with the extra choices to consider.  We decided instead for a single-tile hand, but everyone would draw immediately after they played, giving them the other player's turns to consider where to place.  This sped the game up considerably.     Eric hadn't played before, but after we explained that a Metro strategy is to play tiles that hamper your opponents when you can't help yourself, he immediately took the offensive.  He closed down a number of Jay's trains prematurely, with Jay retaliating in spades.  Joe, Brandon and I had fun egging them on.  Jay wound up with 5 of 6 trains closed down by the middle of the game.  Most of the routes seemed to be low-scoring, with only a handful of routes terminating in the middle of the board, where they count for double points.  Joe managed to keep one of his routes winding around for most of the game, ending in an 18-point train without the aid of doubling in the middle.  This let him pass Brandon in the end for the victory.  Metro was a nice choice for the night.   Final Scores: Joe:  64 Brandon:  61 Jeff:  45 Jay:  44 Eric:  26   Ra Rather than choose a long game which would take up the rest of the night, we opted to play another medium-length game that hadn't hit the table in a while - Ra.  Our group loves Ra, mostly because we just love shouting "RRRaaaaaaaaa!" to start a bidding round.  Jay busted out his Alea version (I'm jealous!) and we got to it.  I can't remember much of the game, other than from my perspective.  I grabbed 4 pharaohs in the first round and kept the lead in pharaohs for the rest of the game, netting me 15 points.  I also had a decent collection of monuments (6 total) by the final round, and never ended a scoring round without at least 1 civilization tile.  I also managed to score for floods & Niles in the second and third rounds, netting me a decent score.  I did manage to have the lowest sun total at the end for -5 points, but due to a bad final round for Joe (no civ tiles), I managed to squeak out the victory.   I've never been particularly good at bidding games in general, but Ra specifically.  I usually wait too long to take offers, getting screwed by the Ra tiles filling up the board.  This was the first game I felt like I executed well, winning things when I needed them.  It only took 15 games to figure it out.  :)     Round-by-Round Scores: Jeff:  18 / 28 / 45 Joe:  21 / 31 / 35 Brandon:  7 / 10 / 25 Eric:  16 / 18 / 22 Jay:  13 / 12 / 17   Ticket to Ride Since we stuck to medium-length games, we had time to get in a fourth game before everyone headed home.  We decided on Ticket to Ride since everyone was familiar with the rules.  Our game started off very strangely, with everyone laying their first routes in the North / Northwest area.  It's not uncommon that these large East-West routes get claimed quickly.  However, it's uncommon that no one immediately claimed one of the West coast California routes, nor did anyone start in the Northeast.  There was immediate competition.   My initial tickets were all North-South destinations, with two overlapping.  I wound up starting with Duluth - El Paso (10 pts) and Calgary - Phoenix (13 pts).  I started by completing Calgary to Helena to Duluth, and was picking up white cards in preparation for the 5-white route from Denver to Phoenix.  Brandon had claimed Vancouver to Calgary and Winnipeg to Sault St. Marie, leaving a 6-white route open between his tracks.  I could tell he was nervous about me picking up white cards, thinking I was going to connect up Calgary to Winnipeg and block him.  I thought about it, but decided if I did, that lessened my chances of completing the Denver to Phoenix route that I needed.  Brandon was very relieved when I laid down my 5 white cards.     The game got a little ugly when Eric and I both blocked Jay in the Midwest.  We forced him to take a longer route, which again I could have blocked with the two blue tickets in my hand for the last Kansas City to St. Louis route.  Once again, I decided to play for myself, opting to take additional tickets rather than blocking individual players.  I was lucky in my ticket draws, drawing New York to Dallas.  It wasn't hard to get over to either city from my Duluth to El Paso leg, and that was completed easily.  On my last ticket draw, I got Denver to El Paso, which was already completed, but only worth 4 points.   In the end, everyone completed their routes except Eric, who had an unlucky extra draw at the end.  The scores were relatively low due to a lack of destination ticket draws.  With five players, taking extra tickets becomes very risky.   Final Scores:  (base tracks + destination bonus) Jeff:  70 + 38 = 108 Brandon:  72 + 31 = 103 Jay:  65 + 21 = 86 Eric:  72 + 20 - 7 = 85 Joe:  46 + 35 = 81     We wrapped up the evening with a few traditional games of foosball and called it a night.  Hopefully we'll do it again this Friday.  As always, pictures are in the gallery.  Posted Oct 24 2005, 03:47 PM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Session Report, Boardgames, Friday Night Games

• I :heart: the Belgian post office

  A picture is worth 1000 words, so here are 3000 happy words.       Posted Oct 22 2005, 12:33 PM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Boardgames

• Die Macher is mine - one down, seven to go

  Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions on how to find Die Macher.  Through the BoardGameGeek forums, I was able to find a seller in Belgium and acquired two copies.  They shipped Wednesday morning, and will arrive between 2-3 weeks.  I can't wait!   I had a lot of fun finding Die Macher.  The thrill of the hunt was there with every eBay auction that went by, every email that hit my inbox, and every Babelfish translation I had to run to translate German into English.  Though it was frustrating at times, I can't say I didn't have fun.   It was so much fun that I think I'm going to keep hunting and collecting for a few more games.  They are:   Full Metal Planete Carabande Carabande Action Set Ra (Alea #1) Chinatown (Alea #2) Taj Mahal (Alea #3) Adel Verpflichtet (Alea #5)   I recently discovered the beauty of the Alea "Big Box" series of games.  I own Puerto Rico, Prices of Florence and The Traders of Genoa.  Fifth Avenue is coming on my next online purchase (this weekend), which leaves me with 4 Alea OOPs and 1 Alea in-print (Mammoth Hunters) to complete the collection.   I'm off to eBay to see what I can find!   Edit:  Judging by Shannon's post at the Gone Gaming blog today, I've been bitten by "The Collector Bug" Posted Oct 21 2005, 11:49 AM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Boardgames

• Borders Gaming: Age of Steam and Niagara

  I have a small backlog of session reports that I haven't gotten around to posting.  I think I'll do them in reverse order, since Tueday's session is fresh in my memory.   Age of Steam Tuesday night was the regular Borders night with the Dallas Gamers, which I missed last week.  This was a good turnout, with 4-5 tables of games going on most of the night.  Jay had requested via email that we do another Age of Steam game, and Eran was happy to bring it along.  John joined the three of us to play the vanilla game with no expansion maps.  I started off as first player and took the "urbanization" action.  I connected St. Louis to a new city to Evansville, and Jay followed me up connecting to the north end of St. Louis.  Eran claimed a city in the east, while John took a city in the Great Lakes area.     On the second turn, Jay and I were already in competition.  We were both eyeing Des Moines to the west of us, with cubes that could be shipped to the middle of the board.  I snagged "first build", thinking I would get there, making him choose another city.  He wound up grabbing "engineer", which let him build four tracks this turn.  This piqued my curiosity, because I noticed he could connect to the city I wanted from another spot 4 spaces away.  Since he had used "locomotive" on the first turn to increase his links, he would be able to ship a 2-link good while I wasted a shipping action to upgrade my locomotive!  Not good!  Thinking this was probably the route he would take, I chose to build in such a way to block him from the city.  This meant I was not able to complete the route immediately, but I thought I would finish it off next turn.  This would prove to be an error in judgment that would put me far, far behind and effectively take me out of the game.   On the next turn, Jay built before me and blocked the incomplete route I started last turn.  I had exactly the amount of money I needed to build a complex track to complete the route, but that left me with a shortage of money and I was not able to pay my expenses that turn.  Instead of having a surplus of cash and breaking even, I had no money and went backwards on the income track!  I never recovered from the block, and was non-competitive the rest of the game.     John and Eran fared much better than I.  Eran played a similar strategy to his last game, creating a long string of connected cities from east-to-west, and was able to ship some excellent goods in the middle turns.  John was content to form his own network in the northeast, and had little competition for the goods he was shipping.  He shipped a lot of 5-link goods in the final three turns.   Jay kicked all of our asses.  He kept up with John and Eran in the mid-game, increased his locomotive to six, and was able to capitalize with some 6-link east / west purple routes on the last two turns.  He wound up in the -8 income adjustment on the last turn, and outdistanced everyone for the win.   Final thoughts:  I knew that calculating your own income incorrectly and going backwards on the income track could be disastrous, so I've been careful with my planning.  I wasn't aware that another player's actions (specifically, a block) could set someone back as far as it did.  I'll have to be more careful next game about leaving unconnected track lying around.  That can be very dangerous.   Niagara Our Age of Steam game lasted a while (of course), but I had a chance to jump into a quick game of Niagara with Carl, Jeff B, Mike and Eran.  I missed the rules explanation, but had read a good description of the game on BGG.  The rest of the rules were very intuitive, and I only had one flub during play because of this.  (notably, that you may only steal a treasure from another canoe while moving upstream.)   For those that haven't played, Niagara is a novel game with an interesting board.  As you can see from the picture below, the playboard is a river made up of loose clear plastic discs, which represent the spaces that the canoes may move along.  The goal is to gather a certain number of gems from the banks of the river, and return them (one-by-one) to the mouth of the river.     Players are given tiles with numbers 1-6, as well as a "weather" tile.  Each turn, players play one tile face-down to represent their movement for the turn.  Clockwise, the players reveal their number and move their canoes along the river, either downstream or upstream (but not both for a single canoe).  Additionally, a player may grab a gem from the banks of the river for 2 points.  If a player lands their empty canoe on the same space as another player's canoe while going upstream, they may steal a gem from that player.   After all players have moved, the river flows downstream.  The river moves a number of discs equal to the lowest number played by all the players, adjusted by the current weather total (from -1 to +2).  The clear plastic discs are inserted one at a time at the top of the river, and pushed down 1 space, causing discs at the end of the river to fall of the falls.  If canoes leave the board in this way, they are out of the game!  (they may be recovered by sacrificing a gem).  The starting player token now passes to the next player, and players play another round using the remaining tiles in their hand.  Once all the tiles are exhausted, players pick them back up and they are all available for the next round.   Our game was mostly unremarkable, other than the fact that Eran was strangely efficient at moving his canoes.  He was able to very quickly pickup four purple gems.  (I only had a single gem when he finished!  Although I would have had two more in the next round.  Grrrrr!)   I wondered from the description if this game would be nothing more than a weak game with a novelty board.  I can't say there is a lot of depth to the game, but it plays quickly and the rules are very streamlined.  It is a nice light game with a high visual appeal, and could easily be played with kids.  This would be a great family game.  I don't think I'll ever purchase it, but I would definitely play it again after another brain-burning game of Age of Steam.   Wrap-up The unofficial list of other games seen played last night:   Go West! Princes of Florence Through the Desert Shadows Over Camelot Domaine Union Pacific Roma Cronberg Cold War Trendy San Juan Ra     More pictures are available in the gallery. Posted Oct 20 2005, 11:36 AM by Jeff with no comments Filed under: Session Report, Borders Gaming